'BOLDLY AND UNAPOLOGETICALLY CANADIAN'? YES, SIRREE!
Boldly and unapologetically Canadian’? Yes, sirree!
As the great ones of this world direct the fortunes of the nations, they inflict much misery by tending not to draw deeply from the well of the ‘fear of the LORD that is the beginning of wisdom’, an expression that resounds throughout Israel’s Wisdom literature. I think in this context of Frederick II of Prussia, ‘the Great’ (!), whose accession to his throne in 1740 coincided with the almost simultaneous mounting her own array of thrones of Archduchess Maria Theresa, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, whose succession to her father was imperiled by the Salic Law in force throughout much of Europe, which forbade daughters to inherit the crowns of fathers dying without surviving sons. An early child of the Enlightenment rightly repelled by his father’s combination of rigid piety with crass brutality, Frederick seized the opportunity to use the mighty military force that Frederick William I, the ‘Soldier King’ who made mincemeat of the Lutheran liturgy in his domains, had built up without any intention of aggressively using it. Indeed, Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg and King only in Prussia, was fiercely loyal to Emperor Charles VI and readily agreed to the Pragmatic Sanction that the emperor presciently negotiated to enable his elder daughter’s accession to everything but the imperial office in her own right (a long story, see Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 - Wikipedia). After a few years, Maria Theresa engineered the election of her husband, Francis of Lorraine, to the imperial crown, herself thereby becoming empress consort.
As young Maria Theresa consolidated her grasp on her domains, her Prussian counterpart marched his powerful forces into the large and rich Habsburg-owned province of Silesia, to which he had no ancestral right. But as the godless of all ages foolishly gamble and as Bismarck was to learn, perhaps to his eternal detriment, ‘Might is right’ (Wis 2:11). Two major European wars were fought between 1740 and 1748 and between 1756 and 1763, which arrayed the nations of Europe against each other in shifting combinations, shed much blood, and failed to loosen Frederick II’s grasp on his stolen province. The second of these conflicts, the Seven Years’ War, is sometimes thought of as the actual First World War, because far away from the European continent France and England struggled with each other for control of India and Canada and other territories. English conquest of Quebec sounded the death knell for French dominion in North America, freeing the colonists to the South of their need for English protection against popish threat, and opening the door to the emergence of Canada as self-governing provinces and, within a century, as the first Dominion of the British Empire that became fully independent as late as 1931.
Our Lord is a true Prophet on the Mount of Olives as He calmly observes that ‘nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom’ (Mt 24:7 et parr.). Russia’s attempt to pluck Ukraine back into its own ruling orbit should occasion no surprise. …Until he appeared before the judgement seat of Christ, Frederick ‘the Great’ got away with his crimes, as did Hitler for a few years. Nor may we forget that Stalin established a Russian empire in Eastern Europe that lasted for almost half a century, that Chairman Mao incorporated Tibet into China, and that the Soviet Union and later the United States in turn unsuccessfully grabbed the governmental steering wheel of Afghanistan, whose martial people frustrated the designs of the Great Powers. Not to forget Prussia’s annexation of the Kingdom of Hanover and two other sovereign German territories in the aftermath of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. As he gave me a brief walking tour through the center of Hanover in 2019, my good friend the noble churchman Bishop Voigt explained how the conquered Hanoverians quietly expressed their distaste for the Prussian takeover by pointedly eating a dessert made in the colours of the dispossessed Hanoverian royal house. But the Hanoverians could not withstand their incorporation into the aggressive juggernaut of the Prussian State, which led to their involuntary involvement in the First and Second World Wars, meaning that they were unable to regain their own identity until 1945.
Which leads me to ask how serious is President Trump in his desire that Canada meekly agree to become the 51st State of the Union? Anyone who has been resident in their part of the world for an extended period of time is aware that New Yorkers, supremely those who live within the bounds and close radius of the city itself, have a forthright way of speaking that is usually not intended to be understood in the literal sense. Given that natives of my own home town on another continent routinely use stark hyperbole that shocks other English people, I understand that the President’s rhetoric may not be intended to be taken at face value. Even so, the United States is certainly militarily capable of effecting an Anschluss of Canada, a project seriously entertained as recently as the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt (War Plan Red: How U.S. could have invaded Canada in war with U.K. | National Post). Given the weakness of the Canadian Armed Forces at this time, the operation could probably be carried out within days, even by only the National Guards of several border States. But is such an outcome something to be calmly contemplated and even desired?
George III ranks among my prime historical heroes as one of the most intelligent, moral, and devout of English and British sovereigns, a figure who until recent years has received a bad press from historians. Denizens of the United States need to realize that His late Majesty did not dictate policy towards the discontented colonists but, as a conscientious constitutional monarch, fell in line with the decisions of his Ministers behind whom lurked the Houses of Lords and Commons, with whom real power in the United Kingdom lay. As he concluded audiences with his Ministers, the King, who had expressed his own sometimes dissenting opinion, would say, ‘Well, I suppose you are going to do what you want.’ His dynasty had been placed on the throne to guard the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the settlement of 1689. George’s European counterparts in the main knew no such restraints.
A negotiated settlement before the outbreak of hostilities or a victory of British arms in the Revolutionary war belong to the great What Ifs of history. But a consolidated British-led State on both sides of the Atlantic incorporating Quebec and surely stretching out to include the whole of North America (how could Mexico have retained its own identity against such a behemoth?) would undoubtedly have been a monstrous development, producing a Super State that would know no limits. God preserve us from such monsters and the damage they would produce.
In the providence of God, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom have slowly developed their own unique identities—Vive la difference! Which prompts me to desire to reread a 1932 essay of Hermann Sasse in which he courageously and sagely takes to the cleaners the racial theories of the Nazi Party that was about to seize control of the German State and override its constitutional procedures. In the 1920s and 1930s much focus rested on the German Volk, with politicians and even churchmen (!) crafting völkisch approaches to their callings. Speaking to a German-language pastoral conference in an area peopled by Poles and Germans, Paul Althaus advocated a völkisch approach to theology and pastoral ministry, overriding a directive of the local church government decades earlier that the aim of Lutheran pastors in that area should be neither to Germanize nor to Polnicize but to Christianize!
As we practice Christian Ethics we fitly reflect on what makes a people, what constitutes a nation. On the defeat of the Central European Powers and Turkey in 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved into its constituent parts, its place taken by a welter of newly independent States whose citizens exercised the much trumpeted ‘right to national self-determination’. In recent years some commentators have observed that Europe could use a Federal State just where the Austro-Hungarian Empire used to be! Okay, but what constitutes a people, what makes a nation? Sasse bravely contended that ethnicity is not the sole factor that gives an answer to these questions, even though ethnicity may play a significant though not exclusive role in resolving the issue. Sasse sees nationality as being determined in some way by the hand of God in history, a call of God that somehow binds initially disparate peoples into one. A good question for us to explore is: What constitutes a citizen of the United States, what makes a Canadian to be a Canadian?
These questions cannot be crisply answered in a brief blogpost and in the case of Canada the issue is complicated by the rise, in the 1960s, of a powerful movement in the Province of Quebec that has wanted to detach la belle Province from the rest of the Confederation and that came perilously close to doing so back in 1995. I recall, while presenting the various kinds of justice in an Ethics class, an excitable and outspoken student from Quebec maintaining that no obligation of exercising justititia generalis, the duties of the part to the greater whole, lay on his Province which, as a conquered territory, has instead all the rights that flow to it under the duties inherent in distributive justice, where the part receives what is its due from the whole. Canadian Federal Governments bending over backwards to bribe Quebec to stay has caused great alienation in Western Canada, supremely in the Province of Alberta.
As an immigrant to Canada who freely swore allegiance to Her Canadian Majesty in 1997, I love my adopted land and cherish the historic ingredients of its unique identity as bright jewels in a glorious crown. Yes, indigenous native Canadians are a foundational part of the mix, peoples who have suffered great injustices, fellow citizens to be accorded all honour and respect. My head would fitly bow to our first native Governor General, even though the lady is an astute operative of the Liberal Party that secured her appointment. A star student of French at age 18 when I turned to another discipline and later had to switch to German in my professional work, I love to speak bad French and don’t understand why all Canadians fail to regard our foundational cultures as worth cherishing. A little while ago I was able to minister and then give the last rites to a lady from Maine who grew up in the French community there. I teared up back in the summer of 1997 when the Mountie present at our citizenship ceremony raised his hand to his cap to salute during O Canada and underwent the same reaction when a detachment of Mounties led a Commonwealth military procession that conducted the late Queen from Westminster Abbey. And I teared up the other day when reading that His Majesty the King pointedly wore a string of Canadian medals over his British military uniform when discharging an engagement in England last week. Monarchy operates best on the level of symbol. The sentiments involved in national identity run deep, far beneath the intellect into sentiment and emotion, even for an immigrant.
Outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s final 30-second broadcast to the Canadian people really was too much to swallow—c’en est trop, Monsieur! For a First Minister of the Crown who swanned into office boasting that Canada under his governance would be ‘the first post-national State’ and had ‘no core identity’ to exit his tenure by smirking that he has always been and will forever remain ‘boldly and unapologetically Canadian’ is too much to bear! (Justin Trudeau bids farewell as PM, vows to stay 'unapologetically Canadian' in last message (WATCH) Goodness, if Canadians were not hopping mad with the US President right now, Trudeau fils would be facing a public stoning. Medical Assistance in Dying is now a leading cause of death. The smell of cannabis infects even the best neighbourhoods and I just read that the Liberal Government wants to legalize a range of other drugs! Expanding the population by ten millions over a decade mainly through breakneck immigration has bequeathed social problems that were articulately set forth in the online Niagara Independent a few years ago (see Homily for the Ascension of Our Lord preached at the Divine Service of the Niagara Circuit at St John's Lutheran Church, Stevensville ON, 18 May 2023 — Gottesdienst). Let those of us blessed with the citizenship of our great land be ‘boldly and unapologetically Canadian’ by all means, but the best way to put this noble aim into effect would be by drawing from the ever available wells of the ‘fear of the LORD that is the beginning of wisdom’. …And, if an ageing legal alien who much appreciates the three distinctive parts of the Anglosphere in which he has lived may say so, ‘Please, Mr President, tone it down.’
PS A friend up North recommended this contribution from a Canadian Roman Catholic which is worthy of reading and hearty assent: Please, America, Stop Trying to “Liberate” Canada - Crisis Magazine Thank you, Mr Hall.